Portland's 1965 Final Four: When Bill Bradley and John Wooden came to town

Three days before he drew comparisons to Jesus on a basketball court, Bill Bradley arrived in Portland in 1965 for the NCAA Tournament's semifinals and found his room at the inn -- a Howard Johnson, the Princeton team hotel.

But there were no beds.

Princeton, the first Ivy League team ever to make a Final Four, was too cheap to spring for full-length accommodations, much to the chagrin of its Rhodes Scholar and All-American guard.

"We had to sleep on sofas," said Bradley, the former three-term U.S. Senator from New Jersey and presidential hopeful, by phone last week. "I thought that was a typical pennywise move."

Both Bradley and his motel memory are apt reminders of Portland's first and only Final Four on its 50-year anniversary: It was at once a major civic achievement undercut by a minor-league feel by standards of then and today, an event that feted the arrival of basketball dignitaries, several of whom went on to become Hall of Famers, then saw them sleep on sofas.

When Portland won the right to host in July 1963, the victory confirmed the momentum organizers felt building ever since the opening in 1960 of the so-called "glass palace" of Memorial Coliseum. Even when Portland narrowly lost out to Detroit for the chance to be the U.S. representative for 1968 Summer Olympics bidding, city leaders felt emboldened rather than snubbed; immediately, plans for a '72 bid were put in place. And almost two years to the day after being passed over in March 1963 by the Olympics, the Final Four arrived in town.

"To drum up the interest to even get a look from the Olympics, and then get the tournament was a big deal," said Ken Wheeler, a longtime sports writer at the Oregon Journal and Oregonian who covered the '65 Final Four. "There were ambitions."

But if the tournament was a coup for the city, reminders were everywhere that though the 13,000-seat Coliseum sold out 11 months before, interest waned nearly everywhere else. These were the days before office bracket pools slowed worker productivity to a crawl every March, and 14 years before the 1979 NCAA final between Earvin "Magic" Johnson and Larry Bird catapulted interest in the tournament to unforeseen levels of billion-dollar television contracts and 70,000-seat requirements for Final Four venues.

It was enough of an afterthought that a different basketball tournament captured the headlines and passion of those in the state in 1965: Oregon's big-school prep state tournament.

"People weren't excited" about the arrival of Princeton, Wichita State, Michigan and UCLA, said Bill Mulflur, who was a 39-year-old executive sports editor of the Oregon Journal in 1965. By comparison, the furor surrounding a controversial decision to move the prep tourney from Eugene to Portland "was only slightly smaller than World War II."

The NCAA Tournament returns to Portland this week with opening-weekend games in the rounds of 64 and 32 as a commercial behemoth, a vastly different tournament than the '65 Final Four, which marked the 27th year of an event only then growing out of the shadow of the National Invitational Tournament. Yet for all its quaint quirks, 1965 remains one of the state's high-water marks in collegiate basketball, when the spotlight turned to Portland for possibly the last time in a Final Four setting. The NCAA hasn't placed the national semifinals at a basketball-only arena since 1996, and Portland does not have a large NFL-sized stadium.

The spotlight captured performances that resonate even as the years roll on: Gail Goodrich's title-game record 42 points earned John Wooden and the Bruins' nascent dynasty a second consecutive title, a feat almost overshadowed by Bradley's tournament-record 58 points in the third-place game, a scoring display so powerful that the next morning's paper analogized it to a miracle ripped straight from the pages of the Bible.

Fans "can believe he walks on water," wrote The Oregonian's Don Fair. "That water routine hasn't been duplicated for nearly 2,000 years, and Bradley has a basketball act which falls only a shade short of it."

"Hyperbole to the extreme," Bradley laughed, 50 years later.

Two years before Wooden and the Bruins left the city champions again, Portland plotted its path to win the Final Four. And it began with something of a secret weapon: The first coach ever to be called an NCAA basketball champion, and friendships that proved the tipping point.

* * *

Guard Gail Goodrich, coach John Wooden and forward Keith Erickson go along with a photographer's gag photo idea in the days before the NCAA Final Four in Portland in 1965. They were supposedly wondering how they would fill the shoes of former UCLA stars.

The Final Four in Portland was technically the fruition of the work of five groups of city power brokers: The Chamber of Commerce, the Greater Portland Convention Center, the Exposition and Recreation Commission (which ran the Coliseum), the Metropolitan Futures Unlimited and a club of boosters dubbed "the Linebackers," all of which underwrote the campaign.

Oregon State, Oregon and the University of Portland agreed to host jointly. Don Jewell, who oversaw all events at the Coliseum, was a slight man at 5-foot-10 who carried an outsized reputation as a skilled manager for whom no detail was too small.

Even Portland's press played cheerleader. In addition to leading the sports department at the Journal, Mulflur was tapped by the NCAA to serve on a promotional committee to spread the good news about the city.

"Just let the NCAA bosses flash the word that Portland has hit the jackpot and the cops will be needed at the Coliseum to handle the traffic jam of early ticket buyers," wrote The Oregonian on July 28, 1963, the day the Exposition and Recreation Commission green-lit a bid on the Final Four.

But it was Howard Hobson who lent basketball credibility.

In 1939, Hobson led Oregon's "Tall Firs" to the first NCAA title with a victory against Ohio State in Evanston, Illinois. Eight years later -- the same year he became president of the National Association of Basketball Coaches -- he took over at Yale. By his second season, the Bulldogs advanced to the tournament's Elite Eight. He would retire in 1956, after stints on the U.S. Olympic Basketball Committee, and seven months after the Final Four's appearance in Portland, he was enshrined in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.

Oregon touted its credentials as a basketball hotbed, hosting 11 NCAA tournament regionals between 1952 and 1963, mostly in Corvallis on the success of Slats Gill's Oregon State teams that played in the nationally respected Pac-8. The Far West Classic holiday tournament, held in Portland, had become an annual success. But for many, it remained an outpost.

Hobson's reputation just so happened to span both coasts.

If he needed any help burnishing Portland's bid, he could lean on a pair of aces in his pocket -- the tight friendships between Oregon State athletic director R.S. "Spec" Keene and Oregon AD Leo Harris with USC coach Forrest Twogood and California coach Pete Newell. Both sat on the NCAA's site selection committee July 10, 1963, in Colorado Springs, when Portland presented against Louisville, St. Louis and Kansas City.

Two days later, longtime site selection committee chair Bernie Shiveley, the Kentucky athletic director, awarded Portland a victory, sight unseen. The papers announced the news proudly with a banner headline stretching the width of the page. And in the copy, it noted it was the city's second national tournament to pick the city that year -- after the Women's International Bowling Congress, too.

The joy fell on mostly deaf ears.

"You're talking something that's pretty hard to get excited about two years away," Wheeler said. "The town didn't erupt."

* * *

Princeton's head coach Bill Van Breda Kolff, right, and Bill Bradley, left, as they watch their team lose to Michigan 93-76 in the semi-finals of the National Collegiate Basketball Championships in Portland, Oregon on March 20, 1965. (AP Photo)

To be a sports fan in Portland in 1965 was not to be without options.

At Civic Stadium downtown, there was Triple A baseball with the Beavers, whose outfield included a .245-hitting 26-year-old named August Garrido -- the future national-title winning baseball coach at Texas. East of the city, there was dog racing. There was horse racing at Portland Meadows, prep sports across the city, and at the Coliseum, sellout crowds watching ice hockey with the Western Hockey League's Buckaroos.

Despite the best efforts of Harry Glickman, however, none of the teams were truly major league.

Glickman was a tireless promoter who brought NFL teams to the city for preseason games, co-founded the wildly successful Buckaroos in 1960 and later brought the Trail Blazers to town 10 years later. But when voters in 1964 shot down a plan to build a city-financed stadium in North Portland called the Delta Dome -- designed to lure an NFL franchise -- it became apparent the closest the city might get to a major-league atmosphere for the considerable future might be the '65 NCAA Tournament.

By good fortune, two of the biggest names in college basketball were bound for a city looking for big stars on March 18, 1965, the day before the tournament held its national semifinals of Wichita State against UCLA, and Michigan against Princeton.

One was Wooden, who was trying to become the fifth coach in NCAA Tournament history to win consecutive titles.

"We had seen UCLA when they played Oregon State in Corvallis, but everyone was in awe of Wooden and the Bruins," Mulflur said. "They played like champions. They acted like champions."

The other was Bradley, the All-American from Princeton and 1964 Sporting News player of the year who was the only undergrad to play on the 1964 U.S. Olympic team as it won a gold medal. He arrived in Portland on the heels of one of his best games, a 41-point game in a 40-point rout of Providence in the East Regional final, but with an uncertain future in basketball. It was known that soon after the tournament, he would leave for Oxford on his Rhodes Scholarship.

"I thought it was my last game, period," said Bradley, who was drafted by the New York Knicks in 1965 but didn't intend to play for them given his studies. It was only after playing in Italy during breaks in his Oxford stay that he considered playing professionally in the NBA. He went on to win two NBA titles with the Knicks, and later was inducted into the NBA Hall of Fame, during a 10-year career.

On March 19, UCLA and Michigan, with star Cazzie Russell, advanced to the final.

As they moved on, basketball luminaries continued to move in. Kentucky's Adolph Rupp and Iowa's Ralph Miller -- who later became the iconic Oregon State coach -- milled around the Multnomah Hotel, the NCAA's headquarters that week, as coaches arrived for their annual conference, swapping gossip and voting on rules recommendations for the upcoming season. They panned an NCAA rule prohibiting coaches from getting out of their seat during play, but a proposal to install a shot clock, however, didn't receive enough support (and wouldn't at the college level until 1985).

Hobson, too, was back to be honored along with the '39 Oregon title team.

The national media didn't show up in the same waves as the coaches. Only a dozen from outside Portland covered the tournament in person; the media presence was so scant that press row for the 1966 big-school prep basketball tournament at Memorial Coliseum used the same configuration, no scaling back needed.

In his duties running promotions for the tournament, Mulflur offered every visiting media member two options for free excursions -- either a beach trip to Ecola State Park near Seaside, or a ski trip on Mount Hood.

"Only one guy, from Dallas I think, wanted to go to the beach," Mulflur said.

* * *

Gail Goodrich, UCLA's All American guard, displays amazing form as he gets off a scoring shot against Michigan in Saturday's National Collegiate Championships. Goodrich scored 42 points as he led his team to a 91-80 win over the top ranked team in the nation in Portland, Ore., March 21, 1965. (AP Photo)

If there was a shortage of interest along press row, thousands without tickets hoped to get seats for the long sold-out March 20 final between the Wolverines and Bruins. Shiveley, the Kentucky AD and tournament director, predicted such a situation one year earlier, when he visited Portland to inspect the 13,000-seat venue and revealed the NCAA actually was hoping for something double the size.

The 13,204 in the stands witnessed two record-breaking performances on the tournament's final day. First came Bradley's 58-point game in a 118-82 win against Wichita State that broke Oscar Robertson's single-game mark for most points. For 40 years Bradley, now 71, has searched for a video copy of the game without success.

"We were all down because we lost in the semis," said Bradley, who remembers being so unstoppable he made 20-foot hook shots -- one left-handed, the other right -- in each corner. "We started playing, and I passed the ball and someone was open, and they'd pass it back to me. I'd pass them the ball again and they'd pass it back. Coach (Butch van Breda Kolff) called timeout and said, 'Bradley this is your last game, shoot the damn ball.'"

In the 7 p.m. title game, Goodrich scored 42 points, which stood as a title-game record until Bill Walton, another Bruin who would go on to become famous at Memorial Coliseum, had 44 against Memphis in 1973.

UCLA beat Michigan, 91-80. If Bradley's buckets were a religious experience, Goodrich pushed the atmosphere in the standing room-only Coliseum to something close to a one-night only tent revival.

"And how the spectators responded to Gail's tremendous performance," wrote Don McLeod in The Oregonian the next day. "Even the die-hard Michigan backers acknowledged Gail's greatness and joined with the others in the rafter-rocking salute."

Goodrich wasn't ready for the praise that accompanied the points, saying in the locker room afterward that it was one of the three best games of his four-year UCLA career. Only hours earlier, Bradley similarly shrugged off what he'd just done as he reconciled what he thought to be the end of his basketball career. In the locker room after the Tigers' win, Bradley told reporters there was little chance he'd skip studies in England to sign a pro contract.

Not even the sports writers would have bet on Bradley sticking to basketball, though. Weeks earlier, comments by Bradley that he might one day run for the U.S. Senate or president caused a stir along the Eastern Seaboard.

Some 3,000 miles away and weeks later in Portland, a reporter reminded Bradley of those ambitions. After scoring 58, a future in Washington D.C. didn't look so far-fetched.

"It's a little presumptuous," Bradley responded that night while getting dressed, "to say I might run for president."

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that dog racing took place at Civic Stadium in 1965. Dog racing used to take place at the site, but was run on its own track near Wood Village by 1965.